eucatastrophe n. eucatastrophic [ < Gr. eu, "good" and catastrophe Coined by JRR Tolkien.] 1. (in a narrative) The event that shifts the balance in favor of the protagonist when all seems lost. 2. A happy ending.

December 2012

12/27/2012

I have to confess, though I teach my history
students about them, I find battles generally uninteresting. The ideas that
send people off to fight are more intriguing to me than the fights. But some
battles and some historians that talk about them disarm my apathy. Richard
Slotkin’s tale of General McClellan, General Lee, Abraham Lincoln, and
Jefferson Davis and their roles at the battle of Antietam in 1862 is one such
work.

The battle of Antietam was about politics; about
geography; about tactics; about strategy; about communication; about ideas. But
mostly, it seems to me that it was about character. It was about leaders being
given the chance to express things about their characters with the blood of tens
of thousands of other men. Once you start seeing it that way, the subject is
hard to resist thinking about.

In the battle of Antietam, as Slotkin presents it,
we see Robert E. Lee knowing enough to trust the good men who worked under him.
Indeed, if Lee has a character flaw, it is that he trusts the men under him to
do more than they actually can do. On the other side of the battle line was
General George McClellan who thought himself so much the superior of others
that he seems to have been afraid to delegate them essential tasks. From some
of his letters to his wife, it would almost appear that he saw himself as the
Union’s great secret weapon; a weapon whose reputation dare not be sullied with
the sorts of defeats that humans are wont to experience - As though for him to
lose a battle or part of a battle would be to risk the nation itself. General
George McClellan wanted a defeat-free life.

I wonder if I can relate?

The reader should understand that George McClellan
was also Democratic adversary to Abraham Lincoln and for many reasons might
well have been targeted as a scape goat for the failures of the Administration to
win the war in less time. General McClellan believed that America was to be a
white man’s country and would have, in no uncertain terms, offered the South
Federal Constitutional protection for slavery to end the war. There have been
those who have argued that his failure to prosecute the war with vigor was the
consequence of agreeing more with his enemies than he agreed with his own
President. Those who see Lincoln as the divine hand behind God’s work of
bringing freedom to the slaves will necessarily find much to denigrate about
McClellan.

But Slotkin’s argument is convincing. McClellan was
risk adverse, perhaps to a fault for someone whose job it is to order men to
their deaths. His men loved him. There is something honorable in that. Ulysses
S. Grant, a General who would be far more willing to both fail and lose men in
his pursuit of ultimate victory became popular only after he won. McClellan was
always popular with his soldiers. “Seen from a longer perspective,” writes
Steven Sears,

“General McClellan
could be both comfortable and successful performing as executive officer, and
also, if somewhat less successfully, as grand strategist; as battlefield
commander, however, he was simply in the wrong profession.”

“It has always been my opinion” McClellan would
later write,

“that the true course
in conducting military operations, is to make no movement until the
preparations are as complete as circumstances permit, & never to fight a
battle without some definite object worth the probable loss.”

It was this quality
that made George McClellan an excellent organizer of men and trainer of
soldiers. Lincoln himself would give him that. As Lincoln told John Hay,

“There
is no man in the army who can man these fortifications and lick these troops
into shape half as well as he. . . . If he can’t fight himself, he excels in
making others ready to fight.”

But Lincoln eventually
had to fire him for his inability to take risks or sustain losses. The battle
of Antietam is just a glaring example of why. McClellan would maintain more
Union soldiers in reserve than Robert E. Lee had at his disposal during the
fight. The simple fact is that Robert E. Lee believed his army capable of doing
things that George McClellan believed impossible for an army three times that
same size capable of doing. The following excerpts may suffice:

“McClellan’s
overestimate of enemy strength was fabulous in scale, and the errors that
produced it were systematic. McClellan typically credited the Confederates on
his front with two or three times their actual strength. Every military
operation McClellan undertook, from his arrival in Washington to the end of the
Antietam campaign, would be premised on the belief that the enemy heavily
outnumbered him. . . . “He refused to risk even a minor a setback that might
strengthen his critics and his enemies.”

“McClellan
also read all intelligence through the distorting lens of his conviction that
he and his army were the Republic’s sole hope of salvation and must run no risk
of defeat. It followed that in estimating the opposition he must always err on
the side of caution, basing his moves on the assumption that the enemy force
was as large as it could conceivably be.”

“So
utterly out of scale were McClellan’s estimates that he was suspected of
cooking the books to justify his unceasing calls for reinforcement. However,
all the evidence suggests that he and his closest advisers genuinely believed
their absurd figures. He and his army were the sole reliance of an imperiled
republic and the only force capable of overthrowing the rebellion. It was only
logical to assume that the Rebels would concentrate every available man to
oppose him and destroy the army he commanded.”

“In
McClellan’s view, the fate of the republic absolutely depended on the triumph
of the principles and policies he represented; and his fate, in turn, depended
on the success of his Army of the Potomac. That army must not be exposed to a
serious risk of defeat, since a reverse would be doubly fatal. It would
embolden the South to continue the war indefinitely; and by discrediting
McClellan it would hand the Federal government over to the Radicals. He
therefore abandoned the idea of prompt action in order to build an army that
would be invulnerable.”

“Yet even with this supposed advantage he
still hesitated to attack. The rivers were too high, the weather was bad,
the roads not suited for the passage of his heavy guns. He needed still more
reinforcements before he could put at risk the army and the reputation on which
the fate of the republic depended. To order his troops into battle was to pass
a point of no return—he would not pass that point without assurance of victory.”

“In
his attempt to make his army an irresistible force McClellan turned it into a
nearly immovable object.”

Of George McClellan’s
missed opportunity to crush Lee at Antietam, Slotkin writes, “The reality was
that McClellan wasted September 16 maneuvering against phantoms.” Lincoln, the
author notes, found McClellan’s timidity excruciatingly frustrating. Lincoln
told Ozias Hatch, a Republican politico and an old friend, that the army that
they saw around them was not the Army of the Potomac: “So it is called, but
that is a mistake; it is only McClellan’s bodyguard,” the President commented.

After discovering just
how close McClellan had been to ending the war at Antietam and how
frustratingly possible it might have been to do so had someone like Ulysses S.
Grant or William Tecumseh Sherman or maybe even George Armstrong Custer been in
charge, Lincoln finally expressed his displeasure overtly. I quote at length.

“Hitherto
Lincoln had presented himself as McClellan’s friend and supporter, larding his
advice and softening any criticism with flattery and assurances of personal
regard. Now he began in the voice of a displeased parent, chiding an unheedful
son: “You remember my speaking to you of what I called your over-cautiousness.”
He followed by questioning McClellan’s soldierly pride, and perhaps his
manhood. “Are you not over-cautious when you assume you cannot do what the
enemy is constantly doing? Should you not claim to be at least his equal in
prowess, and act upon the claim?” There was nothing new in his insistence that
McClellan move sooner rather than later, that he not ignore “the question of
time, which cannot and must not be ignored.” . . .

". . . The letter is, first of all, a lawyer’s brief, which establishes a paper
record showing that Lincoln’s removal of McClellan was based not on political
differences but on McClellan’s failure to carry out a simple and feasible plan
of campaign. It is also an exercise in psychological warfare. . . . He almost seems to be goading McClellan into
some rash outburst or an angry resignation. The letter also shows that
Lincoln’s slow-burning anger at McClellan’s insults, obstructionism, and
opposition could no longer be dissembled. It flashed out again on October 26,
after McClellan excused his continued immobility by pleading the need for new
horses to replace the worn-out beasts the army has been using. Lincoln snapped
back, “Will you pardon me for asking what the horses of your army have done
since the battle of Antietam that fatigue anything?”

In many ways, The Long Road to Antietam is also a book
about Abraham Lincoln’s character as well. Clearly, Lincoln had entered the
Presidency with every intention of healing the disruption of the Union with
every ounce of conciliation that he could offer short of violating his
conscience and his commitment to see the institution of slavery set on the road
to extinction. He intended to protect it where it existed but refused to let it
spread. That was the best compromise that he could offer the South. Eventually,
he came to see that it was an institution that could not be managed. It had to
be killed. In some ways, the views of General George McClellan – views so
similar in nature to the views of the South, convinced him that ultimately, that
he had to align himself with his conscience and forsake political expediency.
In the weeks before Antietam, Lincoln conceived of and drafted the Emancipation
Proclamation, pocketing it until a Union victory could give him occasion to
publish it. “Before Antietam it was still possible for Americans to imagine a
compromise settlement of sectional differences,” writes Slotkin,

“After
Antietam, and the Emancipation Proclamation, the only way the war could end was
by the outright victory of one side over the other. Either way, the result
would be a revolutionary transformation of American politics and society.

“Between
June 28, when he first learned the dimensions of McClellan’s defeat [during the
Peninsular campaign], and July 12, when he returned from a deeply disturbing
conference with McClellan, Lincoln made a series of decisions that would
transform Federal strategy in the most fundamental way. The centerpiece of his
new strategy was the political decision to declare a general emancipation of
all slaves held in Confederate territory. The effect of such a proclamation
would be to make a compromise peace impossible and commit the Union to a war of
subjugation. It would therefore entail a thoroughgoing reorganization of the military
command, a drastic increase in force size, and an ambitious expansion of the
army’s strategic mission.”

“Lincoln
had also come to believe that there had been a fundamental miscalculation of
the political character of the struggle. Like most other Northern leaders,
Lincoln had generally assumed that secession was the work of a small but
powerful cadre of “ultra” politicians whose demagogy had carried moderate
Southerners and the nonslaveholding populace willy-nilly into revolution. The
strategy of conciliation assumed that by inflicting a series of costly defeats
on Southern armies, capturing a few major cities, and imposing an economic
blockade, Federal forces would demonstrate the prohibitive costs of resistance.
The core of the South—geographically and socially speaking—would be threatened
but not attacked. There would be no massive invasion to cause economic ruin and
emotional outrage, and no measures affecting the legitimacy of property in
slaves. The intended result was to give moderate and economically rational
Southerners and poor Whites every reason to break with the ultras and accept a
conciliatory settlement. The hard fighting of the past year had demonstrated
that Southerners had a stronger commitment to secession and a higher tolerance
for economic pain and military loss than Lincoln had allowed for.”

Lincoln understood that
another chance was not likely to come along any time soon. For this brief
moment in time, he had the power to do something to put a dagger in the heart
of a great evil. He knew he would pay a political price and that he would make
himself the lightning rod of a great hatred but he was not looking at life as a
place where the goal was to be liked or loved. His Emancipation Proclamation is
perhaps the boldest move of the war. It was a move that he must have known
could bring him down. As he told Seward, “I expect to maintain this contest
until successful, or till I die, or am conquered, or my term expires, or
Congress or the country forsakes me.” He would also declare his intention not
to quit the game while he had a single card left to play.”

The card, as it turned
out, went well beyond the boundaries of what was previously thought to be the
Constitutional prerogative of Presidents.

“Now
Lincoln was asserting that as commander in chief, he had the power to
confiscate en masse the property of citizens inhabiting rebellious districts,
without judicial or criminal proceeding to determine their personal affiliation
(or lack thereof) with rebellion. At a stroke of the pen some $3.5 billion in
property was legally annihilated—this at a time when national GDP was less than
$4.5 billion, and national wealth (the total value of all property) was about
$16 billion. In purely economic terms, this was an expropriation of property on
a scale approaching that of Henry VIII’s seizures of church properties during
the Reformation, exceeded only by the nationalization of factories and farms
after the Bolshevik Revolution.”

It is no wonder that
Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth would write in his journal the night
after killing Lincoln,

“I can never repent it, though we hated to kill. Our country owed all her
troubles to him, and God simply made me the instrument of his punishment. The
country is not what it was. This forced Union is not what I have loved. After
being hunted like a dog through swamps, woods, and last night being chased by
gunboats till I was forced to return wet, cold, and starving, with every man's
hand against me, I am here in despair. And why? For doing what Brutus was
honored for. What made Tell a hero? And yet I, for striking down a greater
tyrant than they ever knew, am looked upon as a common cutthroat. My action was
purer than either of theirs. One hoped to be great himself. The other had not
only his country's but his own, wrongs to avenge. I hoped for no gain. I knew
no private wrong. I struck for my country and that alone. A country that
groaned beneath this tyranny, and prayed for this end . . .”

In the end, Lincoln was willing to believe that a
black man could be a great man and that great risks were demanded of those who believed
that. General McClellan, Jefferson Davis, and Robert E. Lee did not, it appears,
believe that and the later two were willing to take great risks to prevent
black men from proving them wrong.

As for General McClellan; He believed himself a
great man and was unwilling to take great risks if they were the sort of risks
that might have proven him wrong.

Question
for Comment: It seems to be a given that all men
fail at some point in life. Do you fear failing? Why or why not?

12/09/2012

The narrator of John Irving’s novel, A Prayer for Owen Meany goes by the name
of John Wheelwright. I suspect that it would be a mistake not to make the connection
to the Puritan minister, John Wheelwright who was banished to Exeter New
Hampshire (Phillips Exeter is the real Gravesend in the book and John Irving’s alma mater). One senses that the narrator,
writing from Toronto, is himself a person who, like the author, feels banished
for caring too much about his faith.

The hero of A
Prayer for Owen Meany is the irascible, Owen Meany – a diminutive but
forceful presence who speaks with a high voice but an uncompromising veracity.
In many ways, John Irving has imbued Owen’s life with all the accoutrements of
a Christ figure. His parents insist that he was virgin born. Owen challenges
the temple establishment even as a child, confounding his “superiors” with his
understanding of human nature and the world. Owen is an iconoclast who “always
hated the sermon part of a service” and exposes hypocrisy wherever he sees it. “They
make themselves appear moral, he says of America’s leaders.” “I thought he was
a savior,” he says of JFK, “… then they
use the power just to get a thrill.” He says all the things of hypocrites in political
and religious leadership that Jesus did.

And the spiritual leaders in the story are people
who have lost the faith that they insist that others have. “God had stopped
speaking to him,” John Wheelwright says of pastor Merrill, “and he had stopped
asking Him to.”

Similarly,
Owen sees himself, Jesus-like, as an instrument of God. His arms are not his
own. They are tools of the Almighty given to do the Almighty’s will whatever
that might be. His arms have been donated to God to do with as He wills, even
to the point of amputation. Owen Meany rests in the knowledge that it is not
himself so much as God that rules his actions and their outcomes. Likewise, he
speaks as “THE VOICE” – his is not one opinion among many so much as the
abstract truth. “Verily, verily, I say unto you.” John Irving has created a
prophet in the mantle of a lowly son of a granite worker from Gravesend, New
Hampshire. Thus did Owen Meany remodel Christmas,” Irving writes when Ownen Meany
finagles his way into being both the Christ-child and the “ghost of Christmas
Yet to Come” in the yearly Christmas Carol production, “he had established himself as a prophet.”

In an interview with Irving supplied in the appendix
to the book, the author mentioned that he considered putting all of Owen Meany’s
words in red but opted to simply type them
in CAPITALS. HE wanted them to stand out. To be both irritating and divine.

Like Jesus, Owen Meany sees his own death and
prepares for it. The reader cannot read those sections of the novel where Owen
predicts his own demise without remembering the words of Jesus to his
disciples,

“He
then began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be
rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that
he must be killed and after three days rise again.He
spoke plainly about this, and Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.”

In A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Wheelright and his cousin Hester play
a similar role, trying to convince Owen Meany that his “dreams” and his vision
of sacrificial death are hallucinatory. It would be impossible to miss the many
and varied ways in which Owen Meany is used as a symbol of Christ. He is “lifted
up” by his peers. He is banished and rejected by his superiors. He is a gadfly
and a pestilence to those he speaks out against. He is a “cleanser of the
temple” and a voice against those who care more for money and power than they
do for people. And in the end, Owen Meany gives his life to save the children
of “the enemy.”

Owen Meany is conscious of his
role. He believes that he will die but that he will also live forever (and in
the story that Johnny Wheelright and John Irving spin, he will). ''Jesus
has always struck me as a perfect victim and a perfect hero,'' said John Irving
once, explaining the genesis of his A
Prayer for Owen Meany. In the interview following the book, Irving explains
that he is not himself a devout person or believer. He says that what he set
out to do when writing this novel, is to write about an experience that, if it
were to have happened to him, would have convinced him to be one. A Prayer for Owen Meany is a story that
would make him a believer if he were to have experienced it. ''What degree of
religious belief I can manage owes as much to personal experience as it does to
all those years of conscious and subconscious training within church,'' Mr.
Irving said in the interview. The same is true of John Wheelright in the novel.
''When I am moved to see beyond my usual doubt,” Irving says in his interview,

“When I am moved to
something that approaches real faith, it seems to me, I am basing those
instincts for belief on personal experience as much I am on any formal
religious training.''

Like John Wheelright, he is brought to faith only by
experience – by direct contact with a trut believer - and not by the preaching
of sermons about the experiences of others. I am reminded of the experience
that the Quaker, Margarette Fell had when listening to the preaching of George
Fox (founder of the Society of Friends):

"And so he went
on, and said, "That Christ was the Light of the world, and lighteth every
man that cometh into the world; and that by this light they might be gathered
to God," &c. I stood up in my pew, and wondered at his doctrine, for I
had never heard such before. And then he went on, and opened the scriptures,
and said, "The scriptures were the prophets' words, and Christ's and the
apostles' words, and what, as they spoke, they enjoyed and possessed, and had
it from the Lord": and said, "Then what had any to do with the
scriptures, but as they came to the Spirit that gave them forth? You will say,
'Christ saith this, and the apostles say this;' but what canst thou say? Art
thou a child of the Light, and hast thou walked in the Light, and what thou
speakest, is it inwardly from God?" &c. This opened me so, that it cut
me to the heart; and then I saw clearly we were all wrong. So I sat down in my
pew again, and cried bitterly: and I cried in my spirit to the Lord, "We
are all thieves; we are all thieves; we have taken the scriptures in words, and
know nothing of them in ourselves."

John Wheelright doubts Owen Meany. But eventually
comes to faith because of Owen Meany.
Why? Because Owen Meany’s life only makes sense when Owen Meany dies. Owen
Meany’s death makes it impossible to doubt Owen Meany’s life – Owen Meany’s message.
Indeed, as Irving writes in his opening line,

“I am doomed to
remember a boy with a wrecked voice—not because of his voice, or because he was
the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my
mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian
because of Owen Meany.”

Irving seems to be arguing with John Wheelright,
that we believe, not so much because of texts, but because we know someone who
believed and their lives of belief convince us. John Wheelright tells us in the
opening paragraph, that his faith is not rooted in textual sources. “I'm not
very sophisticated in my knowledge of the Old Testament,” he says, “and I've
not read the New Testament since my Sunday school days, except for those
passages that I hear read aloud to me when I go to church.”

He comes to believe because of his love for Owen Meany
and because Owen Meany’s convictions came true.

“What a coincidence “ I
said when the Flying Yankee had gone. . . . But Owen smiled at me … Of course I
know now that Owen did not believe in coincidences. Owen Meany believed that coincidence
was a stupid shallow refuge sought by stupid shallow people who were unable to
accept the fact that their lives were shaped by a terrifying and awesome
design, more powerful and unstoppable than the Flying Yankee.”

In Conclusion, we discover that the prayer for Owen
Meany is not a prayer to help Owen Meany. Owen needs no help He is God’s
incarnate son in the novel. The Prayer for Owen Meany is a prayer that he be
returned to us. “O God-please give him back! I shall keep asking You” the last
sentence of the novel reads. Irving intentionally echoes that last words of the
New Testament,

Perhaps what he is calling for is for people who,
like Owen Meany, or like Jesus, make it possible for us to believe in miracles.

“Miracles don’t cause belief,” pastor Merrill tells
Johnny, “Real miracles don’t make faith out of thin air. You have to already
have faith to believe in real miracles.” This is why we need people like Owen
Meany in our lives. People who make it possible to believe. This is why we miss
those people so dearly when we lose them. “The only thing wrong with me is what
is missing,” says Johnny Wheelwright, “Owen Meany is what’s missing.”

Question
for Comment: Who is the person in your life who has
made it possible for you to believe? In miracles? In Destiny? In Providence? In
some intelligent and loving being guiding us all through life? Or have you
simply not met that person yet?

“It was my first clue that atheists are my brothers
and sisters of a different faith. Like me, they go as far as the legs of reason
will carry them - and then they leap. I'll be honest about it. It is not
atheists who get stuck in my craw, but agnostics. Doubt is useful for a while.
We must all pass through the garden of Gethsemane. If Christ played with doubt,
so must we. If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if He burst out from
the Cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" then surely we
are also permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy
of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.

“I can well imagine an athiest's last words:
"White, white! L-L-Love! My God!" - and the deathbed leap of faith.
Whereas the agnostic, if he stays true to his reasonable self, if he stays
beholden to dry, yeastless factuality, might try to explain the warm light
bathing him by saying "Possibly a f-f-failing oxygenation of the b-b-brain,"
and, to the very end, lack imagination and miss the better story.”

First of all, this is a book I read several years
ago. Watching the recent film adaptation got me to thinking about it again
because it is a book worth thinking about (and because it compliments Salmon Fishing in the Yemen quite
nicely). Let’s start with the title, Life
of Pi. Yan Martell has left the definitive article “the” out of his title
for a reason. The reason is that Pi (the young Indian boy who is the main
character) has more than one life – or at least more than one rendition of it.
His nickname is Pi, a fundamentally irrational number that serves many
pragmatic functions. In a sense, Pi
is a good metaphor for faith – something that can never be comprehended but
does not need to be comprehended to be used.

In the novel, Pi adopts not just one faith but
three. He is a Hindu, a Christian and a Muslim. Each of them serves him somehow
and though the clergy of each religion wants his soul exclusively, he seems to
want to maintain a spiritual life that works like a Swiss army knife. He
intelligently sees how each of these faith systems offers him some sort of
happiness or survival advantage. Indeed, to his religious faiths, he has no
objection to adding his father’s Darwinist skepticism. For Yan Martel and for
Pi, stories are functional. Religious stories are particularly so. None of the
sponsors of his various world-views are pleased that he has not chosen them to
the exclusion of others. “Alas the sense of community that a common faith
brings to a people spelled trouble for me,” says Pi,

“In time, my religious doings went from the
notice of those to whom it didn’t matter and only amused, to that of those to
whom it did matter—and they were not amused.

“What is your son doing going to
temple?” asked the priest.
“Your son was seen in church crossing himself,” said the imam.
“Your son has gone Muslim,” said the pandit.”

In an interview about the book, Martell was asked to
compare fiction and religion. “For either to work, you have to suspend your
disbelief,” he responded.

“The subtext of Life of
Pi can be summarized in three lines:

1) Life is a story.
2) You can choose your story.
3) A story with God is the better story.”

It is a particularly pragmatic approach to religion.

“Whatever the truth is, I don’t see how it will help
me get food on the table.” Katness Everdeen says in The Hunger Games. This is what pragmatists think about truth. Here
it is in the mouth of Pragmatism’s key prophet, the philosopher, William James,

“Pragmatism asks its
usual question; "Grant an idea or belief to be true," it says,
"what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual
life? How will the truth be realized? What experiences will be different from
those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the
truth's cash-value in experiential terms?”

“Any idea upon which we
can ride …; any idea that will carry us prosperously from any one part of our
experience to any other part, linking things satisfactorily, working securely,
saving labor; is true for just so much, true in so far forth, true
instrumentally.” – William James

Yan Martel was a philosophy major and I suspect is
reflecting this philosophical approach in his story/stories.

Life of Pi is a about a young boy who has
experienced the tragedy of a shipwreck that kills his family. He has two
stories about what happened. One involves him being stranded on a lifeboat with
a zebra, a hyena, an orangutan, and a Bengal tiger. The other involves a human
tragedy in which his mother and a deck hand and a cook are killed by one
another. The second is the more believable story but it is the story that neither
Pi nor the ship company investigators want to be regarded as official. And so
they both choose the more unbelievable story to be the story of official
record.

“If you stumble about believability, what are you
living for?” Pi asks the ship company investigators.

“Love is hard to
believe, ask any lover. Life is hard to believe, ask any scientist. God is hard
to believe, ask any believer. What is your problem with hard to believe?”

“The world isn't just
the way it is. It is how we understand it, no? And in understanding something,
we bring something to it, no? Doesn't that make life a story?”

For Pi, as I suspect for Yan Martell, religious
belief should be regarded as “necessary craziness.” “All living things contain
a measure of madness that moves them in strange, sometimes inexplicable ways,”
Pi says, “This madness can be saving; it is part and parcel of the ability to
adapt. Without it, no species would survive.” “Reason is excellent for getting
food, clothing and shelter,” says Pi, “Reason is the very best tool kit.
Nothing beats reason for keeping tigers away. But be excessively reasonable and
you risk throwing out the universe with the bathwater.” Pi understands that his
first fictional account of what happened to him on the lifeboat is beyond rational.
He knows that the investigators will not buy it. “I know what you want,” he
tells them,

“You want a story that
won't surprise you. That will confirm what you already know. That won't make
you see higher or further or differently. You want a flat story. An immobile
story. You want dry, yeastless factuality.”

But also knows that when the chips are down, they
will choose the story that serves their own interests, believable or not.

In an online interview, Yan Martel explains the
origins of the story by saying this.

“I chose the name Pi
because it's an irrational number (one with no discernable pattern). Yet
scientists use this irrational number to come to a "rational"
understanding of the universe. To me, religion is a bit like that,
"irrational" yet with it we come together we come to a sound
understanding of the universe.”

“I had an agnostic
upbringing in Quebec, in a strongly anti-clerical, anti-religious culture. At
university, where I studied philosophy, part of my training was to cut to shreds
all the proofs of God. A spiritual perspective was missing in my life, and so I
started attending mass at a Catholic church. . . .”

“You can view the world
in different ways - historical, scientific, social, political - but there are
limits to what you can do with a calculator or a hammer. You must make a leap
of faith to get the full flavour of life.”

A reader by
the name of amagmom logged in to the interview and complained that she
did not like what the author had done to the mom at the end of the story (she
is killed). “I did not like that the Mom Died! That hurt,” amagmom writes.

“Yes, that was hard, responds Martell, “But
I wanted a story so horrifying that people would choose the first one. After
all, in both stories, the mother dies. So why not choose the better story, I
say.”

His point exactly.

Question for Comment: In Romans chapter 1, the
Apostle Paul accuses humanity of knowing the truth about God but of
intentionally exchanging what they knew for convenient falsehoods that served
their darker interests. Here is what he writes:

“The wrath
of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness
of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known
about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since
the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and
divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made,
so that people are without excuse.”

“For
although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to
him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although
they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the
immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and
animals and reptiles.”

Essentially, he accuses humanity of taking a “pragmatic”
approach to understanding religion. They start by saying “What do we want to
get away with?” and then they construct a vision of God that will allow them to
do so. Gods like mortals are exchanged for gods like birds, and then animals,
and then lizards (How low can we go?) Martel is arguing that it is advantageous
to us to invent our own story of God and to live by contradictory stories if
that serves us. Paul is arguing that this is a great temptation that we should prohibit
ourselves from taking. What do you think?

12/08/2012

“We
act on behalf of a client with access to very substantial funds, who has
indicated his wish to sponsor a project to introduce salmon, and the sport of
salmon fishing, into the Yemen.”

Two people marry. They
are perfect for one another. Then, years later (or months later) one wants to
change and the other doesn’t. The question arises: Will the partner who wants
to change decline to do so in order to save the marriage? Can they? “No one
sews a new cloth onto and old garment,” Jesus once said. “No one puts new wine
into an old wineskin.” His point is that you cannot take something that will not adapt or grow and affix it to
something that will not remain as it is.
Something will give. (I know his intention when constructing it was to discuss
the relationship between an active spiritual life and religious rites and
rituals. His point was that you cannot take a living spirituality and encase it
in a rigid dogma or ritual.) But what does this have to do with Salmon Fishing in the Yemen? Much. Lets
begin with the main characters.

Dr. Fred Jones is a
scientist; A fisheries expert to be exact. And he has all the qualifications of
a man about to discover that, like it or not, there is a raving romantic in all
of us. Here is how Fred Jones describes himself, his wife, Mary, and their 20
year marriage.

“For
Mary's anniversary present, I have bought her a subscription to The Economist, which I know she enjoys
reading but begrudges the cost of buying for herself. She bought me a
replacement brush for my electric toothbrush, which is most useful. I never
think much about anniversaries. The years pass seamlessly. But for some reason
tonight I feel I ought to reflect on what is now many years of marriage to
Mary. We married not long after leaving Oxford. It was not a whirlwind romance,
but I think ours has been a calm and settled relationship suitable for two
rational and career-minded people such as ourselves.”

“.
. . What else can I say about more than two decades of marriage? We both keep
ourselves fit. I go running two or three times a week; Mary does Yoga when she
can. We were vegetarians but now eat fish and white meat, and I allow myself
alcohol from time to time, although Mary does so rarely. We enjoy reading as
long as the books are improving or informative, and occasionally go to the
theatre or to art exhibitions. And I fish, an unreconstructed activity of which
Mary disapproves.”

“.
. . So there it is: another anniversary. This year has been much like the last
year, and that year was very like the one before. If I occasionally wish for a
little more excitement, a little more passion in our lives, I can usually put
this down to neglecting to follow the dietary guideline that people of my blood
group (Type A) should follow: not too much meat. Occasionally I fall prey to
temptation and eat some beef, and so it is not surprising I then have
irrational feelings of ... I am not sure what. Am I bored, perhaps? How could I
be? It only takes something like this Yemen salmon project to raise its head to
remind me that I have a dislike of the irrational, the unpredictable and the
unknown.”

As I said, Fred is
about to wake up and discover something about humans; We are not entirely
rational or necessarily predictable. Fred has been asked, perhaps a better way
to say it is “compelled,” to undertake an advisory role to a wealthy Arab sheik
interested in transplanting Scottish salmon to a Yemeni wadi. It is of course,
a ridiculous idea; one that Fred’s sensible nature finds particularly
reprehensible. And yet it also appears to be the catalyst for a renaissance of
repressed romanticism in him. The sheik’s audacity – his passion for salmon fishing
and for a great, though crazy, cause inspires something within Fred that his
wife, a banker – slash risk management expert, cannot understand. In time,
Fred’s perception of himself as a reasoning objective mind begins to
disintegrate. He begins the novel a rather indefatigable atheist for example. But
he will not end it as such. “Last week I gave the third in a series of talks,
"Why God cannot exist,"” he says when introducing the reader to his own
character,

“and
I like to think that these talks in some way provoke the audience to question
the superstitions of earlier eras which still linger on in the religious
teachings that regrettably persist in some of our schools. . . . Religious
faith, I argued, was invented in order to pacify the grieving multitudes and
ensure they did not ask the really difficult questions, which, if answered,
would tend to lead to progress.”

His exposure to the
sheik and his participation in what he begins to regard as a miracle begins to
thaw his spiritual ice. “It is odd how quickly things can change in one's
life.” He writes in his journal,

“For
the last two days I have been contemplating the tranquil and intellectually
engaged nature of my life with Mary, and the intense reward I can still derive
from a piece of scientific work well done. All that seems, for the moment, as
nothing. . . . “

Perhaps it is
impossible for one member of a marriage to metamorphose without the other being
forced to adjust or resist. Fred begins to come alive to the novel’s third main
character (all good romances must have a triangle to create tension) as he
begins to wake up to his own needs for a life uncommon and a wife less
masculine. Mary, like so many partners who find themselves in these circumstances
is slow to see the threat to the relationship and slower still to want to have
to respond to it. “Mary always says it is demeaning for working women to dress
themselves up like that,” Fred writes in his journal of Mary’s reaction to seeing
Harriet’s picture online (the threat). “She herself is a strong believer in
sensible, practical working clothes which do not accentuate the wearer's
femininity … Mary says expensive
perfumes are a form of feminine exploitation and no substitute for the frequent
application of soap and water.”

The fact that Fred
Jones is starting to notice smells is a sign of his waking up to the
irrational. The ground is shifting under Fred, and thus under his marriage. He
is beginning to value different things, to smell, to see, to desire, to long
for something, to feel. She goes off to Geneva on a business trip to “count
beans” and escape the gravitational pull of his new-found self. You can see things
unraveling before your eyes. A changing Fred is finding himself mismatched with
a woman who once made sense.

“But
Mary wasn't like Harriet; she would never have ordered a glass of white wine at
lunch, much less persuaded me to have one. "Alcohol is all very well in
its place," Mary used to say, ‘and as far as I am concerned, during
weekdays its place is in a bottle and nowhere else.’ And Mary didn't dress like
Harriet or, frankly, smell like Harriet. Mary didn't believe in smart feminine
clothes or perfume. Mary wore baggy brown linen work suits at home and grey
ones at the office. She smelled clean, of rather antiseptic soap. She was
always neat and tidy ... To my dismay I found I was comparing the two women and
the comparison was unfavourable to Mary.”

What is a person to do
when they find themselves changing? Thawing? Growing? Can a teenager stop
themselves from growing up? Can a person with repressed memories stop
themselves from remembering them? Are we really able to choose when the times
of our spiritual and emotional moltings will be? For Fred, there is something
irresistible about the exact sort of faith that he had always thought so uninteresting
(I suppose that change can come the other way too). In this respect, the desire
to found a salmon fishery in Yemen is a metaphor for the desire to found a new
faith community. Here is the relevant passage.

"But
I have for a long time observed," said His Excellency, "that there is
one group of people who in their passion for their sport ignore all things to
do with class. The sayyid and the nuqqa are united and stand together on the
riverbank and speak freely and without restraint or self-consciousness. Of
course I speak about salmon fishermen, indeed fishermen of all descriptions.
High and low, rich and poor, they forget themselves in the contemplation of one
of God's mysteries: the salmon, and why sometimes it will take the fly in its
mouth and sometimes it will not."

“And
then my countrymen—sayyid, nuqqa and jazr and all classes and manner of
men—will stand on the banks side by side and fish for the salmon. And their
natures, too, will be changed. They will feel the enchantment of this silver
fish, and the overwhelming love that you know, and I know, Dr Alfred, for the
fish and the river it swims in. And then when talk turns to what this tribe
said or that tribe did, or what to do with the Israelis or the Americans, and
voices grow heated, then someone will say, 'Let us arise, and go
fishing.'"

It is a cause. A
mission. Something that seems so ridiculous when Fred first considers it that
he rejects it as nonsense outright (like the seed that falls on stony ground in
Jesus’ parables) but then finds it drawing him, guts-first. And thus with his
guts getting dragged towards God and his partner anchored in her commitment to
mammon, Fred begins to split. IT is hard to know just why we come to these
forks in the road in life. Sometimes, we meet someone who changes us. Someone
like this Yemeni sheikh.

“It
was all very simple and somehow very moving. My client is, I think, more than a
little mad, but it is a charming form of madness, almost a divine form of
madness. He believes that the salmon and its long journey through endless
oceans back to its home river is, in some strange way, a symbol of his own
journey to become closer to his God. You know, a few hundred years ago, the
sheikh might have been called a saint, if there are saints in Islam?”

"Then,
too, said Dr Jones, there is something visionary about Sheikh Muhammad. For
him, this isn't just about fishing. Perhaps, at one level, it isn't about
fishing at all, but about faith. "You've lost me there, Fred," I told
him. "I mean," said Dr Jones, taking off his spectacles and polishing
them with a clean white handkerchief, "that what the sheikh wants to do is
demonstrate that things can change, that there are no absolute impossibilities.
In his mind it is a way of demonstrating that God can make anything happen if
he wants to. The Yemen salmon project will be presented by the sheikh as a
miracle of God, if it succeeds." "And if it fails?" "Then
it will show the weakness of man, and that the sheikh is a poor sinner not
worthy of his God. He has told me that many times."

Faith, like love, like
desire has a life of its own. It does not come because it would be convenient
for you if it did come. It does not stay at bay just because your family says
it is okay for it to come. I suspect that doubt works that way as well. We are
not always at liberty to choose how we will see the world. “What does faith
really mean?” Fred Jones asks himself, trying mightily to resist its tidapull
and its disruptive influence on what had been “a stable marriage.” He piles up
sandbags to stem the flood invading his life.

“I
keep faith with my party and my boss. How does salmon fishing come into that?
It was all rubbish. Faith is for the archbishop of Canterbury and his dwindling
congregations. Faith is for the pope. Faith is for Christian Scientists. Faith
is for the people stranded in the last century and the centuries before that.
It doesn't belong in the modern world. We are living in a secular age. I live
at the heart of the secular world. We put our faith in facts, in numbers, in
statistics and in targets. The presentation of these facts and statistics is
our labour, and winning votes is our purpose. I am a guardian of our purity of
purpose. We are the rational managers of a modern democracy, taking the optimum
decisions to safeguard and enhance the lives of busy citizens who haven't got
the time to work things out for themselves.”

And yet faith will
exert itself. And so will affection. All Fred Jones can do is stand by and note
the changes within himself.

“When
Mary left for Switzerland, there was a vacuum in my life. I had always thought
of myself as a sensible, stable person. When we did our annual performance
appraisal forms at work, we had to write about our colleagues. I know that when
my colleagues wrote about me, the first word they put down was always
"steady." The next was "sensible." Sometimes I was
described as "committed." Those words were a true picture of Dr
Alfred Jones, as I once was.”

He is no longer, as he
would say “steady” – Like many people who encounter these passages along the
pilgrimage of life, he begins to reminisce about the reasons for the
commitments that he is now enmeshed in. His own past begins to look different
somehow. Here is Fred Jones reflecting on his courtship with Mary some twenty
years earlier.

“Mary
reached across the table and took my hand. It wasn't the first time she had
done so, and we had even kissed once or twice, but unnecessary emotional
display was not something she approved of on the whole.”

The
DJ was playing "I'm Not in Love" again, and I wondered what those
words meant. The truth is, I didn't know about love just as I didn't know about
fear of death or space travel. It was something I hadn't encountered or, having
encountered it, had not known it for what it was. Did that mean I wasn't in
love, or did it mean I was in love, but didn't know? I remember feeling as if I
stood at the edge of a great cliff, tottering towards the precipice.”

“Of
course ours was a sensible engagement. We agreed that we could not get married
until we had both graduated and were in employment and our combined salaries
had reached more than £8,000 a year.”

“And
then, as slowly as the light fades on a calm winter evening, something went out
of our relationship. I say that selfishly. Perhaps I started to look for
something that had never been there in the first place: passion, romance. I
daresay that as I entered my forties I had a sense that somehow life was going
past me. I had hardly experienced those emotions that for me have mostly come
from reading books or watching television. I suppose that if there was anything
unsatisfactory in our marriage, it was in my perception of it—the reality was
unchanged. Perhaps I grew up from childhood to manhood too quickly. One minute
I was cutting up frogs in the science lab at school, the next I was working for
the National Centre for Fisheries Excellence and counting freshwater mussel
populations on riverbeds. Somewhere in between, something had passed me by:
adolescence, perhaps? Something immature, foolish yet intensely emotive, like
those favourite songs I had recalled dimly as if being played on a distant
radio, almost too far away to make out the words. I had doubts, yearnings, but
I did not know why or what for. Whenever I tried to analyse our lives, and talk
about it with Mary, she would say, "Darling, you are on the way to
becoming one of the leading authorities in the world on caddis fly larvae.
Don't allow anything to deflect you from that. You may be rather inadequately
paid, certainly compared with me you are, but excellence in any field is an
achievement beyond value." I don't know when we started drifting apart.”

Robert Frost, in his
poem, The Woodpile speaks of a moment
where he has to decide to pursue his impulse to explore the swamp “one grey
day” or simply return to his comfort zone. Fred Jones must make a similar
choice.

“I
remember thinking as I lay in bed that everything about my life is strange now.
I am sailing in uncharted waters and my old life is a distant shore, still
visible through the haze of retrospection, but receding to a grey line on the
horizon. What lies ahead, I do not know. What had the sheikh said? I could feel
sleep coming upon me fast, and the words that came into my mind, my last waking
thought, were his but also seemed to come from somewhere else: "Faith
comes before hope, and before love."”

It is a journey, so
lacking in some known destination, that his wife has no interest in making it.

“But
then, as with everything in Mary's life, it was all part of the plan.”

Fred tries to reach out
and invite her to travel with him but, she is just not ready. Not interested.
“I am conscious I have been a little brief with respect to personal matters,”
she writes from Geneva,

“I appreciate your saying you miss me. I have
been too busy of late to reflect as deeply on personal issues as I should. I recognize
that a work-life balance has to be sustained, and that to wholly subordinate
one's personal life to one's career is self-defeating and just as likely to
damage one's career path as the other way round. Therefore you might like to
make a diary note that I have some leave coming up next June, which is only
eight months away. Perhaps it would be appropriate to spend a few days together
to reassess our lives, jointly and individually.”

Eight months. It is
hard to imagine that Fred will still be there for such a talk in eight months.
She insists that his silly commitment to the Yemen Salmon project will ruin his
career (and their financial stability). Meanwhile, Fred’s partner in the
project, Harriet, is ever so obviously, making the same transition that Fred
is. “Fred keeps saying, we have the technology,” she writes in a letter,

“The
rest is up to the salmon. I try to think of other insane projects where belief
has overcome reason and judgment: the Pyramids, Stonehenge, the Great Wall of
China—the Millennium Dome, come to that. We are not the first and will not be
the last people to defy common sense, logic, nature. Perhaps it is an act of
monumental folly. I am sure it is. I am sure people will laugh at us and scorn
us for the rest of our lives.”

The words of the
Persian poet Rumi come to mind:

We are all powerless by
Love's game.
How can you expect us
to behave and act modest?
How can you expect us
to stay at home, like good little boys?
How can you expect us
to enjoy being chained like mad men?
Oh, my Beloved, you will find us every night,
on your street,
with our eyes glued to your window,
waiting for a glimpse of your radiant face.

I swallowed
some of the Beloved's sweet wine,
and now I am ill.
My body aches,
my fever is high.
They called in the Doctor and he said,
drink this tea!
Ok, time to drink this tea.
Take these pills!
Ok, time to take these pills.
The Doctor said,
get rid of the sweet wine of his lips!
Ok, time to get rid of the doctor.

Let the lover be
disgraceful, crazy,
absentminded. Someone sober
will worry about things going badly.
Let the lover be.
Let yourself be silently drawn
by the stronger pull of what you really love.

Faith, Salmon in the
Yemen, and Harriet begin to fuse into a vague projection for a different life.
“I am married to Mary and have been happily married to her for many years,”
Fred confesses in his journal, “I know we are having a difficult passage in our
life at present, but it is unthinkable we could part, that there could ever be
anyone else in my life. I am just not that sort of person. Am I?”

“It was hard to say
just where I was,” writes Frost from the swamp in The Woodpile, “I was just
far from home.” One senses that intra-psychic dislocation in Fred’s self
conception. “Am I?”

“I
have journeyed this far, to this strange place. The man who started the journey
months ago as a staid, respected scientist at the National Centre for Fisheries
Excellence is not the same man now standing at a window looking out onto the
wild mountains of the Yemen. How much farther will this journey go? Where will
it end, and how will it end?”

“How will it end?” Fred
Jones is not the same Dr. Fred Jones that married Mary. And the new Dr. Fred
Jones cannot imagine life with her any more. And the old Dr. Fred Jones lays on
the floor like a molted snakeskin. We see the danger this poses to his marriage
and to Fred’s atheism. (There is a certain irony to the fact that the distance
between Fred and his wife grows as the distance between he and faith shrinks).

“I
tried not to think about Harriet, but she kept intruding into my thoughts, as
real as if she were standing in front of me. I could almost see her, like a
ghost, now gaining substance, now fading again, her voice, thin and
insubstantial, saying, "There isn't any hope, not for me, not for
you." I thought about the sheikh saying, although I could not remember his
exact words, "Without faith, there is no hope. Without faith, there is no
love."

“Then
in a moment, in that vast space of rocks and sky and scorching sun, I
understood that he had not meant religious faith, not exactly. He was not
urging me to become a Muslim or to believe in one interpretation of God rather
than another. He knew me for what I was: an old, cold, cautious scientist. That
was what I was then. And he was simply pointing out to me the first step to
take. The word he had used was faith, but what he meant was belief. The first
step was simple: it was to believe in belief itself. I had just taken that
step. At long last I understood. I had belief. I did not know, or for the
moment care, what exactly it was I had to believe in. I only knew that belief
in something was the first step away from believing in nothing, the first step
away from a world that only recognised what it could count, measure, sell or
buy. The people here still had that innocent power of belief: not the angry
denial of other people's belief of religious fanatics, but a quiet affirmation.
That was what I sensed here, in this land and in this place, which made it so
different from home. It was not the clothes, not the language, not the customs,
not the sense of being in another century. It was none of these. It was the
pervading presence of belief. I believed in belief. I didn't exactly feel as if
I was on the road to Damascus, and I was aware I could not think straight
because of the power of the sun, but now I knew what the Yemen salmon project
was all about. It had already worked its transformation on me. It would do the
same for others.”

Warning: Plot spoiler.
What makes Salmon Fishing in the Yemen more
than just a novel of infidelity, is precisely because it ends before there is
any. We are left at the end knowing that Fred Jones has changed and cannot go
back to being who he was. The question will hinge on whether it is possible for
Mary to follow him. He now believes the impossible. But the author astutely
leaves us not knowing which of two impossibilities Fred will attach himself to.
His wife has seemed to be unreachable until the very end where she asks him to
come back to her. Is this the miracle that this story will end with? Harriet
has explained in no uncertain terms that she cannot consider Fred’s love for
her, as she is mourning the death of her life’s great love (a soldier who died
on duty in Iraq). Will Harriet be the miracle?

Poor Fred. He believes
in the power of miracles now but he has no guidance which path leads to it or
which miracle is more likely. The author leaves that decision to the reader
(The movie, alas, does not.)

Question
for Comment: Have you ever
been the partner of someone who changed when you did not? Or visa-versa, have
you ever been the partner of someone who won’t change when you can’t seem to
stop doing so? What place does commitment play in such situations? What does
“God” want a person to do when they find themselves so tested? How do partners
force each other to grow? (I often think of the way that they can slingshot
each other into wholeness). How can they know when trying to force that change
is doing nothing but shattering another person’s core self?

12/02/2012

“For the previous year
or two no matter how long our spells of serenity, Jesse and I had kept falling
into quarrels, like victims of malaria breaking out into fevers.”

Hunting for Hope is a series of essays inspired by a
argument between a father and his eighteen year old son. When Scott Russell
Sanders asks his son Jesse what is at the core of his anger, he is told that a
person can only handle so much negativity about life when they are young. “Was
this the deeper grievance?” Sanders asks himself after that conversation, “–
that I had passed on to him, so young, my anguish over the world?” Out of this
conversation, the author determines to seek out and re-affirm his sources of
hope. He determines to “look harder for antidotes, for medicines, for sources
of hope.” And thus each chapter explores his intentional self-reformation and
the effects of that self-reform on his relationship with his son.

In chapter three, the author discusses the way that
many people give up hope and surrender to a dependence upon something eternal
and other worldly. He explains how in his own life, as tempting as this might
be, it remains his goal to find hope within the confines of this world so much
as possible. He determines to show his children where in moments of grace, he
has found it here. And that leads to a series of reflections on where we can
all find it. He begins by talking about the importance of wildness - Of going
into nature and reconnecting with it as a means of restoring ourselves. One can
hear the spirit of John Muir in this essay.

“Everybody needs beauty
as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give
strength to body and soul alike. . . . Keep close to Nature's heart... and break clear away, once
in awhile, and climb a mountain or spend a week in the woods. Wash your spirit
clean. . . . In God's wildness lies the hope of the world - the
great fresh unblighted, unredeemed wilderness. The galling harness of
civilization drops off, and wounds heal ere we are aware. . . . Most people are
on the world, not in it. - have no conscious sympathy or relationship to
anything about them - undiffused, separate, and rigidly alone like marbles of
polished stone, touching but separate. . .. There is a love of wild nature in
everybody an ancient mother-love ever showing itself whether recognized or no,
and however covered by cares and duties.”

The fact that there are still places where we can go
to reconnect with nature gives the author hope. The fact that there are people seeking
to protect and expand that relm of healing in the world gives him more.

“The likeliest way to recover our senses is by
shutting off out machines and closing our books,” writes Sanders, “climbing out
of our tunnels, our cars, our electrified boxes, walking beyond the pavement to
actual dirt or rock and opening ourselves up to the world we have not made.” There
is hope in knowing that we still have these senses, he argues and that we need
only stop clogging the channels of joy with our detritus in order to feel those
joys again.

In chapter seven, Scott Sanders sets out to remind
himself of the treasure of hope that his family and the sense of connection
that family gives him. “Grown suspicious of every person we meet, fearing disappointment
or disaster we may withhold ourselves from love and friendship, from any sort
of membership and try going it alone, he writes, “But that road leads to despair.”

“I wish to live in a community that has a keen
awareness of its own history, one that values continuity as well as innovation
and aspires to leave a wholesome place for others to enjoy, undiminished, far
into the future.” The family values that I embrace,” he writes

“are the habits of
heart and mind essential for creating such a community, and among these are generosity
and fidelity and mercy, a sympathetic imagination, a deep and abiding concern
for others, a delight in nature and human company and all forms of beauty, a
passion for justice, a sense of restraint, and a sense of humor, a relish for
skillful work, a willingness to negotiate differences, a readiness for
cooperation and affection. I don’t pretend that we always live up to those
values in my own family, but we aspire to do so.”

He goes on to talk about how difficult it can be in
the economy we have made for ourselves to work towards these goals.
Unfortunately “our economy has less and less use for more and more people, and
most of these discarded people know and bitterly resent this.” Still, the hope
of that possibility is there for us all. He believes that the family is durable
and that it, like the wildness of the previous chapters, can be rescued if it
is valued.

In the next chapter, he discusses how “fidelity”
gives him hope. Fidelity, he defines as a “yearning to find a person, an idea,
a vocation, a cause to embrace with a while heart.” Fidelity to missions,
persons, causes gives him hope. He believes that as people cultivate this
character trait, the world cannot help but get better.

“I consider how grim
the world would be for all of us without the innumerable acts of kindness and
support arising from fidelity, not only of children for parents and parents for
children, not only of partners and neighbors and friends for one another, but
of visionaries for their causes, workers for their jobs, citizens for their
communities, inhabitants for their home ground.”

In the subsequent chapter, Scott Russell Sanders
looks at “Skill” and he comments on how the fact that we humans can develop,
learn, and teach skills gives him hope. He finds himself “deeply encouraged by
the steady refinement of our abilities as individuals and as a species. “We
carry in our minds we hold in our hands, the power to bring about a more
elegant, peaceful and becoming existence fort all creatures.” Subsequently,
Sanders moves on to talking about “Simplicity” and his belief that in our
ability to simplify our lives there is hope.

“Since our identification of hope with perpetual
growth is rooted in our evolutionary history, he writes,

“we can’t just decide
to feel good about living with less. We cannot force ourselves to welcome
living with limits. We can, however, shift the focus of our expansive desires.
We can change, deliberately and consciously, the standard by which we measure
prosperity. We can choose to live a materially simpler life not as a sacrifice
but as a path to greater fulfillment. In ancient terms, we can learn to seek
spiritual rather than material growth.”

As I often say, there are many ways to be rich and
poor. We can be money rich but memory poor, or meaning poor, or relationship
poor or health poor, etc. Sanders draws on a few quotations by various Quaker
authors to highlight how the excessive pursuit of one sort of wealth can crush
our inward life. I suspect that we all feel this. The author finds hope in
knowing that we all know how much more than we need we all have.

Chapter twelve is about beauty. “By giving us a
taste of the kinship between our own small minds and the Mind of the Cosmos,"
he writes,

“Beauty reassures us
that we are exactly and wonderfully made for life on this glorious planet, in
this magnificent universe. I find that affinity a profound sources of meaning
and hope. A universe so prodigal of beauty may actually need us to notice and
respond, may need our sharp eyes and brimming hearts and teeming minds, in
order to close the circuit of creation.”

Chapter Thirteen is entitled “The Way of Things” and
explores how the author’s beliefs about God give him hope. His belief is not
necessarily traditional but it is a belief in a universe that can be depended
upon. It is a belief in grace that allows us to go beyond belief in ourselves
and our ability to save ourselves. For Sanders, the nature of reality gives us
cause for “cosmic optimism.”

What is delightful about the book is how the author
weaves his ongoing story with his son into the fabric of exploration of his own
psychic attitude. Over time, you see him healing himself with his writing. And
in healing himself, you see health return to his wounded relationship with his
son Jesse. His argument is an argument that we can rewire ourselves, we can
choose to think differently and thus be different. And that in willing those
changes of attitudes upon ourselves, we can reclaim the damage we have done to
our human relationships by damaging attitudes. In a way, the intermission
chapters (entitled “Mountain Music”) contain the real message of the book: We are capable of change if we are capable of
reimagining ourselves. And therein lies our greatest hope.

Question
for Comment: The
reason that I called my blog “Eucatastrophe Reader” some years ago when I
started it, was because I wanted to give myself the time to rethink myself –
hopefully in surprisingly positive ways. For me, writing is the way that I go
about changing myself. How do you change yourself? What relationships in your
life need repair and how will that repair have to begin with repairing yourself
and how exactly do you repair yourself?